Near the top of many progressive, creatives‘ lists one will find San Francisco or New York City. Why? Because there’s raw excitement in living in a trendsetting city - experiencing the future in the present. From Smart cars to Yelp! to flash mobs - you’ll find them first, exclusively or most prevalently in such a city. So what’s the latest sign of things to come? Weekend pedestrian-only streets.

Spurred by an international movement to close major urban thoroughfares to cars and allowing only

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Kansas City’s new outdoor ‘living room’

It’s not a model for supporting local independent businesses, certainly not a natural cultural district, and its website opens with the words “Greed, lust and gluttony… and that’s only dinner”, but Kansas City’s new $800 million ‘corporate cultural district’ does provide clear evidence that there’s a growing market for pedestrian-only districts in downtowns.

The nine block Power & Light District is a one developer, formula-driven entertainment zone

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Place and event-based social networks on the rise

The internet will never replace a sense of community based on face-face relationships, but it’s progressing rapidly as far as being a more effective complement to facilitate that face-face sense of community.

First you had email listservs/mailing lists where everyone receives everyone else’s messages to the group, which quickly compared to spam, followed by online message boards, but required thousands of users to make it work.

Then along

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Entrepreneurs, newer companies leading economic growth

What’s leading economic growth in our cities?

Robert Litan, VP of Research and Policy at the Kaufmann Foundation* and director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution**, concludes that more of our growth today is generated by entrepreneurial or newer companies. He answers the following question in this interview from Smart City Radio:

Smart City Radio: “If you were advising a local urban leader on how he or she could

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What’s hot? Bicycles?!

As you can see by the graph, bicycle production is enjoying a renaissance, increasing in each of the last six years while car production has remained steady in growth. Much of the recent growth has been driven by the rise gas prices as well as in electric bike production, which has doubled to 21 million units in the last three years. Since 1970, bicycle output quadrupled while car production doubled.

The city of Copenhagen (pictured) plans to invest more than $200

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A live-cowork site in San Fran

You’ve heard of live-work units where owners either live about their workplace or have extra room to work in their living space. However, how about a live-cowork space? That’s the Hat Factory in San Francisco.

In the evenings the Hat Factory (word on the street was that a former tenant made hats there) is home to three tech-oriented workers, but during business hours they open it up to about seven other untethered workers. As you can see, it has a much more

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So what’s the delivery truck equivalent of the bicycle? Look no further than Paris, the home of 20,000 shared bikes, and there you’ll find La Petite Reine, a delivery company that utilizes a fleet of 60 Cargocycles.

With a delivery capacity of 400 lbs. and 50 cubic feet within an 18-mile delivery radius, La Petite Reine completes 2500 deliveries every day for larger corporate partners like DHL that can’t access the more intimate street networks of more pedestrian-oriented downtowns.

‘La

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Inter-national Small Cool Apartments 2008

Not to be outdone by the smallest coolest apartments in the U.S. brought to you by Apartment Therapy, here are the international winners:

First place (topmost image) - Nicolas’ Mini Loft, Lille, France, 630 s.f. “I keep things that are useful or important to me, and get rid of the rest : no extra room to accumulate! You feel lighter when you don’t own too much stuff!...“

Second place - Aad’s Compact Dwelling (Suitable for Laziness), Rotterdam, The

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Small Cool Apartments 2008

It’s that time of year again to check out the winners of Apartment Therapy’s Small Cool 2008 contest to discover the smallest (under 850 s.f.), coolest apartments in the U.S.

First place (topmost image) - Tony and Hilary’s 3 in 1 Studio, Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY, 460 s.f. “Living here as a couple with a cat, we have enough space to store everything we need without sacrificing comfort.“

Second place - Jordan’s Ordo Ab Chao, Los Angeles, CA, 412 s.f. apartment

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Ten defining principles for a true green community

There’s a ton of buzz on green communities sprouting up everywhere, and while the US Green Building Council provides LEED standards for neighborhoods, it’s not nearly the benchmark that the BioRegional Development Group provides. Their ten One Planet Living Communities principles start at zero net carbon and go from there:

Zero Carbon - Zero net CO2 commissions via on-site renewable energy, supplemented by off-site renewable energy if

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The first zero-energy community in North America?

Being that a zero-energy community means 100% renewable energy, that’s no small claim to make. However, the renowned zero-energy development firm in the UK, Bioregional Development Group (profiled in the previous entry), is working with U.S. firm Codding Enterprises to build just that in Northern California, the first ever in Northern America.

The hypocrisy with these eco-villages are that they’re built on greenfields - either farm land or

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Zero-energy community in the UK

There’s a lot of talk of zero-energy (100% renewable energy) urban communities, but not a lot of built examples.  The Beddington Zero Energy Development, or BedZED as it’s better known, is a rare exception, developed by the BioRegional Development Group, probably the world’s leading sustainable development firm.

OK, so it may resemble a chicken farm on the surface, but it’s a monumental achievement in sustainability.  Completed in Wallington, South London in

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The first 100% fully wind-powered town in the U.S.

Rock Port, Missouri may only have a population of 1300, but it claims a title that no other community in the U.S. can - all of its energy is generated by a renewable resource. In fact, its four $90 million 1.25 MW wind turbines producing 16 million kilowatt hours annually leaves 3 million kilowatt hours in excess.

How was it financed?

That can best be explained via this CNN Money example involving five windmills, five farmers, and a total

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A third place for bicyclists

You may have heard about the cafe for bike commuters, but what about a hangout for casual riders?  That’s what two native local entrepreneurs had in mind when they opened the Little Red Bike Cafe in Portland, OR last year.

What makes it a bicyclist’s third place?

- The bike-thru - Little Red Bike Cafe’s version of the drive-thru (pictured behind the kids). Plus a 50 cent discount on your coffee if you bike.
- Lots of bike parking.
- A very well written and

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The continued rise of the home office

We hear a lot of buzz about the popularity of people working at home, but how prevalent is it?  Here’s a snapshot via answering a few questions:

How many U.S. Americans are working at home? 28 million at least part time in 2006.
Is that number growing? That’s a 10% increase from the previous year and a 40% increase from 2002.
Do U.S. Americans have home offices?  7 out of 10 have offices or designated work stations, a 112% increases since 2000.
How

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It’s the question I’ve lately been getting asked the most, so I thought I’d publish a response.

First of all, to clarify in the simplest terms, a beta community is the future group of tenants/buyers/customers for a place to be, involving crowdsourcing it into a community numbering in the hundreds. But how does it all begin?

It may help to explain where the millions of people initially came from to establish eBay, Facebook and YouTube - by providing a unique valuable service and allowing

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The ‘creative treehouse’

If you’re looking for an affordable, creative place to work or hang out, you’re in luck if you live in Pittsburgh, or more precisely, Bellevue, Pennsylvania, 4.5 miles from downtown Pittsburgh. That’s where you’ll find the Creative Treehouse; a 7500 s.f. arts-oriented coworking space.  The key ingredients?  An inexpensive lease in a developing neighborhood.

The membership-structured (starting at a mere $25/month) space features:
- A creative service center that

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‘Workforce housing’ and why local businesses want it

Imagine if half of all your employees suddenly couldn’t afford to live conveniently near your workplace? Many of them would leave rather than spend two hours of their daily lives in traffic or transit. Of course you’d replace them, but you wouldn’t be attracting the same level of talent, then naturally, your customers would gradually realize the same.

Thus local businesses today are advocating for more ‘workforce housing’ - housing that

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Carbon footprint per passenger mile

For those of you wondering what the carbon impact is between walking, riding and driving, the folks at the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit sustainability research center, provides an answer with clarity.

Some insights from the graph:

- You can’t get much greener than a walkable community.
- It’s easy to see why SUVs get such a bad rap, though a solo hybrid is no better than a 3-person SUV carpool.
- It’s easy to see why hybrids get such good press,

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Urban square spon-taneous: Mass-created fountain

In this ongoing series of spontaneous creative happenings that are attracted to the public stage that is the urban square, 1500 students gathered in Place Ladeuzeplein, Leuven, Belgium to create their own instantaneous Bellagio Fountain… out of the infamous Coke and mentos, thus breaking the world record for… most mento-coke fountains at once.

Ok, it’s not the kind of thing that jives with the Story of Stuff, but whoever has a problem with

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Urban square spontaneous: Roman pillow fight

What’s the so called Committee for the Termination of National Apathy to do to achieve its mission of relieving anxiety and stress? A national pillow fight of course!

Some 300 people celebrated the third annual Roman Pillow Fight on Sunday, April 27, 2008 in Piazza Santa Maria in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, simultaneously commencing massive pillow action at precisely 6 pm when the piazza’s clock tower began to chime.

It’s one of those

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